What's our goal in life? Ease and comfort? Jesus invites us to a higher goal-faithfulness.

In the Christian story," the English author and scholar C. S. Lewis once wrote, "God descends to re-ascend." With the exception of Jesus' final return, Lewis' words nicely bookend the big moments of Christ's life: incarnation, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension, just as the Ascension itself sums up who Jesus was and is.

Which came first: baptism with water or with the Holy Spirit? Scripture seems to say one, the other, or both. When Peter and John heard the good news of Philip's successful mission trip to Samaria, they followed and found that the people "had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus," so they laid hands on them and conferred the gift of the Spirit.

One of the great lies of sin is that we are alone in the world. If we orient our lives toward that conclusion, then it's easy to get swallowed up by fear and loneliness. We've all gone down that path. Our minds jump from "I am alone" to "it's every person for himself" to "it's a dog-eat-dog world, and I'm going to get mine before somebody gets me."

There are trade-offs. We make them all the time. You can choose to wait for the train or drive. The train might be running late, so you could be in the cold for a long time, or it may be uncomfortably crowded.

In today's second reading, Saint Peter urges people to keep their consciences clear, "for it is better to suffer for doing good . . . than  for doing evil." How do you go about that? A good rule of thumb in any morally confusing situation is to simply "do the next right thing" in front of you.

Do a Google search of May 22, 2011 and you'll find some interesting things scheduled for today: Elvis Costello in concert at Madison Square Garden, Bill Clinton to give a speech in Montenegro, the day the world will end, Usher playing in Omaha.

At the time I probably thought of him as a party pooper, but now I'm grateful to Don. I was in high school, and a bunch of my friends and I were scheming to pull a prank on a guy in our class who was often the butt of our jokes. We were telling ourselves that it was all in good fun

We moved out of our family house, where I had spent my entire life, during the summer before I left for the college seminary. It really was the only home that I knew. It was torn down at the end of that summer so that a high-rise apartment building could be built on that site.

Is Hannah dead? A 4-year-old asked his mom about a little friend he hadn't seen in a while. The mother could see the bewilderment and worry in her son's face. Death had become a big issue for him even though he didn't quite understand what it was all about.